The ship moved north-north-east, Africa to Asia. Arabia’s ochre hills sliced into the water to form half of an invisible chasm that emerged in the north as the Jordan and Bekaa Valleys and in the south as the Great Rift. The sun was casting Africa’s half of the valley into shadow, while the desolate, treeless slopes of the Arabian side shone against the coming darkness. A cartoon in white rock on the Saudi slope pointed our way. It was an open book perched atop a scimitar as large as England’s prehistoric chalk horses and overendowed men. In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it could have been only one book, the book, the Koran. The sword of religion, Saef ed-Din, protected, as in the past it had delivered, the Word of God. From the middle of the Gulf of Aqaba in the northern Red Sea, I could almost touch four countries – Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. To my left were Taba in Egypt and Eilat in Israel. To my right, only a stroll away, was the Saudi desert. And ahead, in the middle, was the town with the fortress that had been my destination when I set out from Turkey fourteen years before.
When Captain T. E. Lawrence invaded in 1917, there were no Eilat, no Taba, no Saudi Kingdom. Apart from the invisible demarcation between British-occupied Egypt and the Ottoman Empire that the Bedouin ignored, borders were unknown. ‘For months,’ Lawrence wrote in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, ‘Aqaba had been the horizon of our minds, the goal: we had had no thought, we had refused thought, of anything beside.’ Modern Aqaba lacked any characteristic to make it anyone’s horizon. It was, like Eilat next door, a minor beach resort with large, empty hotels and palm trees dropped in for decoration. Yet it had obsessed Lawrence, and it had eluded me in 1987. I had attempted and failed to reach it that July for the seventieth anniversary of Lawrence’s triumph. Halfway between Alexandretta in southern Turkey and Aqaba, my Beirut oubliette was as much a legacy of Lawrence’s military campaign as the mini states born of the myth of his Arab Revolt. Out of the 1917 fall of Aqaba came flag-swinging little Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan, whose squabbling and land grabs had led to the wars and mayhem and kidnappings that blocked my way in 1987 – an inconvenience compared to the tragedies imposed upon the natives.
The last words I read before disembarking at Aqaba, painted in black on the wheelhouse of the cargo ship Al Houda, were ‘Safety First’. A Jordanian officer – Jordan’s police and soldiers are the best dressed in the Middle East with their starched tunics and regimental headgear – took our passports and instructed us to board an old bus. On the quayside, Jordanian flags dropped from dark masts, the red – green – white – black motif replicated like an Andy Warhol portrait series, the shade of each depending on the way it caught the sun, how weathered it was or how it dangled from its lanyard. In Jordan, as in Egypt, flags were outnumbered by only one other artefact: pictures of the leader. When we set sail from Sinai, I was relieved that a giant effigy in Nuweiba port of President Hosni Mubarak, the air force officer whose luck had made him Egypt’s vice president when soldiers assassinated his predecessor in 1981, would be the last for a while. In Jordan, young King Abdallah’s visage proved as ubiquitous. It greeted me at the dock, welcomed me on the bus, invited me into the immigration hall, watched with unaffected lack of interest while an official stamped my passport, looked up at me from the ten-dinar banknote that I used to buy a Jordanian visa with his family coat of arms upon it and smiled as I walked through several interior checkpoints where soldiers of different units examined my documents. Outside, the young king hovered over our long taxi queue.
An old Toyota taxi took me half a mile to the next portrait of the king at what turned out to be the real taxi stand for cars going to Aqaba town. Here, we admired more images of the monarch in costumes that signified his many roles: father, soldier, tribal chief, descendant of the Prophet, bridge builder, peacemaker, Bedouin warrior, businessman, friend of the people. Like Mubarak and every other Arab leader, Abdallah was Ram ad-Dar, head of the house. In all traditional Arab houses and shops, the head’s picture – usually retouched in black and white, of an old man framed under glass on a wall above door height – dominated the most important room. President Mubarak, King Abdallah, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Bashar al-Assad in Syria and King Fahd in Saudi Arabia translated to the public sphere the senior male’s leadership of the family. I would see them in Israel, the modern society that created itself to cast off the old ways of the ghetto and of subservience at foreign courts: the same patriarchal portraits in the same positions, alone, high on a wall, old, wise and revered, a father, a grandfather or a rabbi – the Lubavitcher rebbe, a long-dead Talmudic scholar or, in some settlements in occupied territory, the American killer rabbis Moshe Levinger and Meier Kahane. Photographs of prime ministers, who came and went, sometimes in disgrace to return later, were to be seen only in government offices. No one blamed the father, the king, the president for mistreatment by his minions. If the leader knew what was done under his portraits, he would bring to justice all sergeants, bureaucrats or ministers of state who abused the leader’s trust.
My First Evening
I turned on the television in my luxury hotel suite. The state channel played Jordanian music videos in homage to King Abdallah. Montages of a young man wailing in Arabic dissolved into the object of his worship, ‘Ya Malik, ya Malik’ – O King, O King. Ten minutes later, while I unpacked and washed for dinner, the news began. The lead story was neither war in Afghanistan nor murder in the West Bank. It was King Abdallah’s courtesy call on a school. This blockbuster, hard to surpass for news value, led on to further exclusives: King Abdallah at a cabinet session, King Abdallah pouring cement on something and, the coup de grâce, the king and his queen, a beautiful Palestinian named Rania, touring another school. I liked the way the producers began and ended their broadcast on the same theme and wondered what other risks they took to keep the populace informed.
I went outside to the new Aqaba. It was a dull, quiet place at Easter 1973, when I’d hitchhiked down from Beirut and slept on the beach. Aqaba had since matured into a mini Miami of gaudy hotels and private beaches. But it was still dull and quiet. The seafront Corniche looped east and south from the Israeli border and boasted scores of modern hotels, restaurants, pharmacies and cafés where young men watched television at outdoor tables. In 1973, Aqaba and I were poorer, making do with simple fare: grilled chicken at open-air rotisseries under dried palm branches on wooden frames. There were only two big hotels. A long stretch of sand separated Aqaba and the border fence, then closed, with Eilat. On this, my first visit in twenty-nine years, the border fence had opened to turn Eilat and Aqaba into one city. Once, Aqaba had been distinctly Arab with overgrown parks, neglected beaches, wedding-cake minarets and a few camels; Eilat was defiantly Euro-Israeli, concrete slabs, grey socialist-realist architecture, bars and women in bikinis. Now, they looked the same – the same hotels, shopping centres and other investments in concrete. Despite the open fence, Aq-elat, or Eil-aba, was as segregated by race, religion and language as most other cities. The transnational corporations, which gambled on prosperity in Jordan after its 1994 treaty with Israel, were losing. The Palestinians rose against Israeli military occupation in September 2000, and the result in Aqaba was that the Radisson, the Movenpick and the rest had fewer customers than staff. I walked along the Corniche to the Movenpick, Aqaba’s largest hotel, for dinner.
The Movenpick was said to be the new hotel in a town where hotels were under construction on every spare plot. Its vast edifice straddled, via a bridge, both sides of the Corniche. It occupied acres of seafront and its own man-made hill. Its vaguely Greco-Roman columns and mosaics were ornamented with modern versions of mushrabieh, lattices and lathed woodwork that protected windows, as in old Jeddah and Yemen, from the sun and strangers’ eyes. Despite the traditional balconies clinging like spiders to flat marble walls, the Movenpick looked more MGM-Las Vegas, sans casino, than Arabian Nights.
I was the only diner. The waiter, though cordial, spent most of his time in the kitchen. Like most solitary travellers, I had for companions a book, my thoughts and whatever I happened to see. I watched the lobby. A Filipina nanny came in with a flock of fat children in